#+TITLE: Since My Phost Destroyed Escapist Corporation
#+AUTHOR: screwtape
This is a phloggersgarage 100daystooffload but tilde.club is down???
* Context
Some months ago, my fascination with the edgy, rude, disgusting author
and entrepreneur of video game parody comic, Penny Arcade veered into
one Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. I haven't gone back and read the phost
(you're welcome to link me to it if you find it)
but the gist was that Yahtzee was a financial asset paid by one
speculator to do Penny-Arcade but as Youtube video shorts ("while
sailing around on the financial speculator's boat made of money").
Because of and hence after my phost, the corporate candy wrapper
around Yahtzee fired the manager-handler they had hired to maintain
possession of Their Brand. And I am not very inclined to talk about
what happened but I have a sort of Cassandran duty to tell the truth
again.
* Yahtzee quit rather than stay with then-owner Gamurz
rather than their presumable offer of a modest promotion and them
bringing in a new handler for him.
Yahtzee is a YouTube hit celebrity and was the sole cash cow, hence
the corporate decision to clear the other plates.
Obviously Yahtzee's contract was meaningless, and he could quit and
move from being middle class to upper class.
BUT INSTEAD
* Yahtzee founded a company together with his handler, and seven other people
because friendship is magic. This is kinda nice, but
1. In all writing and appearances since, Yahtzee's sick-to-his-stomach
demeanor is because he knows just as well as everyone else that
*all* the money for their new million-dollar-per-annum shared
corporate Patreon was a gift from him to the other founders
2. Including his handler, a suit with everything that
entails. Honestly, watch the interview of the two of them where the
suit is saying their instant success was because his employees (er,
cofounders) understand that they are making monetisable financial
assets as creators owned by their newly incorporating company and
are explicitly not exercising a passion for games as art.
and not, oh, because one celebrity joined them out of friendship.
Yahtzee has both sacrificed eight ninths of his transition to upper
class
- good on him
and in thanks consigned himself to being a financial asset Brand
Property at a second, and honestly equivalent company to all of his
previous hot-potato playing owners.
- this is just as bad
the bone thrown to him is that his new owning company will also become
one of the game publishers he is famous for parodying, based on
monetising Yahtzee's labour-of-love simfarm-like game baby.
* (Ir)relevance to my next show
For a long time now, I've been planning a second weekly show. I wasn't
going to write about it here, but the above happened, and someone
emailed me reminding me to "work on the new show" this weekend. It
would be remisce of me not to learn from aforesaid duffle and lay out
some opposing principles.
** New show topics
*** Apotheosis
through merging physical humanity into each's MOO roleplaying
characters.
*** Veilid
Internetworking through The Gibson et al's distributed hash table
social media public key object store
*** China
Reaching out and including old and new friends in the Chinese speaking
world
*** Recovering our relationship with the earth
as cyborgs, finding an Ixian remediation and preservation of our
natural world.
** Constructing digital reality
I will start a liberapay for this project for the specific purpose of
liberapaying cyborgs to additively extend and author our MOO
world. Liberapay is a non-profit sponsorship basically defined by its
oppositional world view to Corporate Patreon, for long-term,
low-amount community funding (integrated with STRIPE I think, ugh,
real economies).
While I basically expect there to be very not very much money, that
will fuel an increasing number of people in self-ownedly developing
and placing their skill and original authorship into our emerging
shared digital comMOOnity, in a way that creates a natural and
beautiful substrate for more and varied new people to discover,
inhabit and live in, explroe and author.
In particular, I am interested in the world being compatible with the
wonderful people I have met and would like to meet in places including
China, around South America, everywhere and all continents whom I
would often miss out on closely associating with because of physical
and language distances on earth. Hopefully we will find other people
filled with love, art, and curiousity, who may be atypical of common
office work computing and without the venture capitalism of the
businesses described earlier in this article.
** Where are we?
At the beginning. Everyone can watch the project unfold and come to
participate when and how they are ready. It will be possible to
accelerate into the new world via the liberapay, which can be expected
to liberapay more sweat from people's brows.
I have a pentient for moving glacially: It's hard to stop a glacier.
** Where to next?
*** Veilid
Actually, last month I lost my drive with my bits and bobs of a
partial veilid social media implementation in common lisp. I will
chase it back out of my head with a broom as I have time. I hadn't
done ironclad cryptography yet, and it's a topic of the lispy gopher
show this week.
All I'm interested in for our purposes is the freeform social media
component of veilid, which I intend as the substrate for a distributed
MOO world.
I've talked to quite a few people about the allowability of veilid as
such within the Chinese national firewall. ipfs.io is blocked, for
example. However the commentary I got was that it would likely only be
addressed when it gains popularity, and I am optimistic that there is
an arguement that a limited but compatible configuration of veilid
could be permissable. https is used ubiquitously, probably with
ed25519 which has some cryptographic similarities.
**** MOO
This is currently a hard point for me. Putting a MOO app inside
veilid's mechanics sounds to me like all of a novel MOO server, client
and lambdaMOO language implementation.
In particular it has to be new because the paradigm is to be
distributed across veilid, rather than a single server maintaining a
single database. Which is a paradigm change from how MOOs canonically
are.
*** World building
The concept is for a flesh-and-blood human to merge with and into an
idealised roleplaying cyberspace character associated with a veilid
social-media style public key. To become free from those banal moments
in offline space where we have to pretend computer science doesn't
exist to get along: And to get away from those moments forgetting that
the earth exists and needs us while in cyberspace. The object oriented
reality of a MOO is in many respects more tangible and accessible to
us than a purely physical alarm clock is.
We are fortunate to know many great writers, artists, role-players,
readers and other hackers various. One hopes many people will quickly
help author a new world. (Could the cyber-world be inside of the
cosmic.voyage ?).
I think it's important that the world be in some sense an aspirational
role-playing world, since it is my intent to merge into my player
character in that setting. So a rich science-fantasy description of
cyber-reality is compatible with the idea of Neuromancer's Matrix
shared consensual illusion humans use in internetworking together and
with machines.
